E3 2006: Hands on with Nintendo's Wii and new Dell Designs
by Haider Farhan on May 11, 2006 9:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The Nintendo Wii
One of the main things everyone is looking forward to seeing this year is the Nintendo Wii. At Nintendo's booth, all we were able to see was the Nintendo DS at first glance but upon closer inspection, Nintendo had placed a barrier surrounding about half of its booth, reaching a good twelve to fifteen feet high. After waiting in an approximately two and a half hour line, we finally had access to the rest of the Nintendo booth. We found an entire setup of about 100 Wii stations with various games loaded. All the games we saw were full production games except for the last three which were still in development.
Like many people, when we first heard about the unique controller Nintendo developed, we had our doubts. However, we had a chance to play around with the Nintendo Wii and our impression has completely changed. We found the controller to be incredibly easy to use. Although the controller was little too sensitive to the motions you make, it's something you get used to the more you use it.
While the main controller is a remote-like device, there are three other types of controllers, namely, the Zapper, the Nunchuk and the Classic. The Zapper is currently a work in progress to be used for the Duckhunt remake, the Nunchuk is used for, from what we saw, football games, and the Classic style controller is designed to be used for NES, SNES and N64 games. There is no initial price tag or specs, although the specs aren't out to impress anyone anyhow. The expected launch date is sometime in November.
The way the remote-like controller works is via an infrared sensor bar which is wired directly to the Wii and can be placed either on top of or below the television. The bar can be placed anywhere as long as the controller is pointing towards it. Some adhesive backing is used to apply the sensor bar.
Update: If you'd like to see a couple videos of Wii in action, we've created a BitTorrent share of the demonstration. The first shows a couple people playing tennis with the new controller, and the second shows a guy with two controls using them as drumsticks. If you want more information about how to use BitTorrent, here's a quick tutorial. We're using Azureus to host the file, which requires the Java JRE. (E-mail Jarred if you have problems.)
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ninjit - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
I knew some dumbass would bring that up as soon as I hit post.If someone's walking past you to hit up the fridge while you're in the middle of a game, they'll normally try and duck (if they have any sense) so that you can still see over them and play on. But with an infra-red controller you would have to raise your hands up too, or the line-of-sight between your hands and the system would be severed.
And that was just one example, there are so many different ways in which the signal could be blocked: you could have a book or a bowl of chips on the coffee table in front of you, which you'd have to point around... I could go on and on...
If you had actually "thought about it" yourself, you would have realized what I was talking about.
But, from the above two replies it appears commmunication is still done by RF. In which case I'd like to know more about what the infra-red bar is for.
Sea Shadow - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
My guess is that it is only partially based on IR, it would be crazy for nintendo to drop the RF method after all the work with the wavebird. Perhaps there is something more to it. Heck maybe the console uses the IR link to establish an RF connection with the controllers, after all things might get crazy if you just power on 3 or 4 consoles in the same room and expect the various controllers to communicate with the proper consoles. But that is just a guess though.ColdFusion101 - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
Actually the IR is only part of the Wiimote's motion sensing combined with an accelerometer. The controller talks to the Wii through BLuetooth.yonzie - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
On the front page it says "We spent some quality time with Nintendo's Wii"...Well?
Is it any good then?
(all you got is one paragraph :'-( )
oh, and:
"[...] the Classic style controller is designed to be used for NES, SNES and N64 games."
The Wiimote seems perfectly capable of playing NES games (unless of course it's completely IR based), so that should probably have read "[...] to be used for SNES and N64 games."
NegativeEntropy - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
Seconded! If they had final games, tell us about the graphics as that seems to be the only thing about the Wii people are concerned about.solgae1784 - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
......is quite similar to Apple G5 desktop.yonzie - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
... except hideously ugly.johnsonx - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
Can anyone say how I'm supposed to say "Wii"?Same as the english word "Why"?
Same as the english word "We"?
something else?
artifex - Friday, May 12, 2006 - link
like, omg wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!:)
mjh - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
The Nintendo Wii is pronounced as "We."